The West has watched Syria burn and looks weak. A post-Olympics Putin is building an empire, says David Williamson

President Bush’s Welsh credentials took a blow when Charlotte Church revealed a conversation she had with him after she performed at his inauguration.

When he asked where she was from and she said Wales, he asked: “What state is that in?”

If it was disconcerting for the people of Wales to learn that the newly minted leader of the free world was sketchy on the details of Owain Glyndwr’s homeland, the renewal of Cold War politics has revealed how frighteningly little we know about tiny territories with the potential to trigger violent conflicts.

World leaders will now be taking a crash course on the politics of Transnistria, a breakaway province of Moldova that is recognised by few spell-checkers or UN member states. Is annexing this territory – which features the hammer and sickle on its flag and passports – next on Vladimir Putin’s to-do list?

Last week the chairman of its legislature appealed for legislation going through Moscow’s parliament to absorb Crimea to be extended to allow Transnistria to join the Russia Federation.

Has the age of empires been reborn? If Trasnistria follows Crimea in the great bear’s embrace, will Putin encourage South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions that broke away from Georgia with Russian support, to join his club? Suddenly, international relations looks like a high-stakes game of Risk.

A key story of the 20th century was the hunger of people groups to have a nation-state of their own, free from imperial domination. Are we now witnessing a backlash?

The fear of ethnic cleansing runs deep in neighbourhoods in towns and cities in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Transnistria broke away from Moldova because the Russian-speaking population were alarmed by the rise of nationalism and the prospect of that country unifying with Romania.

Nostalgia for Moscow rule is kept alive in Transnistria through the statues of Lenin and the military memorials. When faced with the choice of being a minority in Moldova or part of a gas-rich Russian Federation that has just staged a spectacular Winter Olympics, it is easy to see why people are tempted to look east.

This promise of security, prosperity and, crucially, peace, allowed the Roman empire to thrive for centuries. It might have been a pain to deal with the local centurion, but the barbarians outside the gates were pretty scary.

Tiny nation-states can become scenes of slaughter, as seen in Liberia and Rwanda and now the Central African Republic. Apologists for the Ottoman empire will ask whether many of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa would be safer today and not threatened by political and religious extremism if they had remained part of a giant family of nations.

Putin has cast himself as the guardian of Russian-speaking people. Last week he spoke of the “culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus”.

Even if he does not seek to annex new territory, his message is clear that Russia regards peoples and nations beyond its own borders as part of its domain. Putin has demonstrated he is prepared to back up his ambitions with firepower; he is less interested in drawing new lines on maps than securing an undisputable sphere of influence.

The West may be horrified by Putin’s willingness to cast aside international law and flout traditional respect for the sovereignty of nation states, but the Russian president will not be troubled by our protests. Russia’s near-bloodless intervention in Crimea, he would argue, is scarcely as radical a move as the US-led invasion of Iraq or the use of Guantanamo Bay as a location to water-board the citizens of other countries.

Russian minorities may well take comfort from Putin’s willingness to put boots on the ground in territories such as Georgia and Ukraine. It contrasts with the West’s utter failure to protect dissidents and rebels in Syria by either military or political means.

Geopolitics can resemble a protection racket, in which unsavoury alliances are often struck in order to win a modicum of security. The Russians of Transnistria know which gang they want to join.

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